Crazy Wisdom
The Wizard and the Wand: Humans vs AI - Francis Pedraza
- AI & Agents
- Consciousness & Philosophy
- Psychedelics & Inner Frontiers
- religion
- society
- enlightenment
- meditation
- Utopia
- ai
- individuality
About this episode
Francis is the CEO of Invisible Technologies; a business outsourcing and automation company. On his third appearance on the Crazy Wisdom podcast, we discuss AI, the ideal society, individualism, whether or not AI will conquer humans and so much more. You can reach out to Francis via mail by francis@invisible.email, or on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn at Francis Pedraza (@francispedraza)
(1:24 – 10:53) A quick summary of what Invisible Technologies is about, how it works, its incentives, and what it seeks to achieve, as well as a quick narrative of the company’s rocky history, how it evolved into its current form, and how it is able to offer its USP.
(11:09 – 13:05) The surreal nature of thought; how a single thought can be extremely complex and hold a world of information; why Francis thinks classifying emotions as ‘irrational’ is wrong.
(14:10 – 23:51) Why experts tend to be blind; why AI isn’t going to kill us and can never replace humanity, and why you should read Nick Bostrom’s ‘Superhuman’ with your ‘whole brain’ (i.e. Ian McGilChrist style); can we teach a computer to just be? Are AI information processing and human thinking the same process? Does AI think?
(23:53 – 28:50) Examples of the human inability to predict the future; why AI needs thinkers; a theory of what the singularity may look like, as opposed to the merging of tech and consciousness view; what is the constantly increasing connected nature of society doing to individuality?
(28:51 – 37:42) Why enlightenment isn’t the destruction of the individual; why a society that thrives is a paradox and what this looks like; why Utopia is ultimately fascism and why we should go for another idea instead- as presented by Francis; why none of our mechanisms- not the constitution, and not AI- can save us.
(37:45 – 43:34) Can a community become an individual? It is possible for a large group of people to be fully united in goals and aims? How to get a society of 500 million people to agree to a basic social contract.
(45:30 – 50:39) What an ideal society looks like in Francis’ view; why he’s anti-utopian; why progress is a tricky metric to measure; why societies should constantly readdress their ideas of progress; why technocracy is a sham, and why society shouldn’t be left in the hands of ‘experts’.
(50:58 – 1:01:11) Why enlightenment is a politicized term; why there isn’t just one ultimate enlightenment. Back to progress, why it’s a narrow concept in light of the vastness of being and the knowledge humanity as a whole has lost to time in the death of ancient civilizations. Why non-violence is the core rule of an ideal society and why this rule makes the ideal society inherently unstable. Why the fear of death is the major hindrance to building the ideal society.
(1:01:12) Why the individual is greater than society, even though society is bigger; where do ideas come from?; why immortality won’t solve the dilemma of being a human being in our vast universe; What the real aim of meditation is; why you can never fully understand existence. Alternate interpretations of old bible stories; Francis’ summary of what the ideal society is.
Episode transcript
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. So you might have noticed that the world has gone a little bit insane. And to get through this in a way that is sustainable and maybe even joyous, we are going to have to find some crazy wisdom. Which is why I named the podcast Crazy Wisdom. And I try to find guests who are both contrarian and right, as well as people who can help us to understand how we can get through this period of both experiences acceleration as technology accelerates, and maybe even a little bit of darkness, as well as some of you may have been noticing, really crazy stuff is happening right now. So my goal with the show is to empower you with crazy wisdom and give you the tools to figure out how to do it on yourself, because we can't rely on too much these days. So with that being said, if you like what I'm offering with this show, I'm on Twitter to Stuart Alsop I I, I. My DMs are open. I'd love to hear from you about how this show has affected you. Thanks. Have a great day.
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Francis Pedraza and he is the CEO of Invisible Technologies. This is the third time I'll be interviewing Francis. Really great to have you here.
Well, here we go. So, Invisible. Let's do a quick update on Invisible for our listeners. What is Invisible?
Invisible is a business process, outsourcing and automation company. And what that means practically for most people is that while you're working on your computer, you have a bunch of workflows, processes, projects that you can't fully automate and you have to do yourself or you have to hire people to do, or you have to outsource it. And with Invisible, you can jump on a zoom call with our team and screen share and show us the work. And within 24 to 48 hours, we can build any custom, complex or business critical workflow. And instead of billing you by the hour for our work, we bill you on a unit basis. So it's X dollars per lead, or X dollars per satellite image tagged or X dollars per insurance claim process, whatever it is that you're giving us to do. And because we're an automation company, not just an outsourcing company, we lower the price over time so it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for you as we automate more and more of it. So the front end is very, very simple. It's like Nike, just do it Invisible. Just delegate. You get results on the back end. We've built a lot of technology. We have a digital assembly line. I think of it as like the coolest factory on the Internet where we coordinate 200 workers in 16 countries around the world to industrialize knowledge work. And we have a process builder where we take your delegations that you just explained in natural language and we turn them into step by step instructions for our workers and we build a training platform and we measure our agents on
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